Do social media companies sell your data?

Hi everyone!

Do you personally think that social media companies sell your data?

If you said 'yes' or 'maybe', well, I let this Meta Product Manager tell you what he thinks of that when I suggested it as a reply to a different post he made...

I have to admit... that really did rub me up the wrong way. Thinking a social media company would sell user data is an absolute conspiracy theory...

... but what about all those ads I see on Instagram after I Google something? What about that whole Cambridge Analytica thing? I hear you say...

Since I felt like I was being gaslit, I persisted, and had no less than 5 Meta employees tell me I was super wrong.

The annoying thing about that is that for the last two years I have not been able to post any gFam.live links on Facebook, Instagram or Threads. Apparently gFam.live doesn't meet the community standards, but I've reviewed them and I can't see how...

... I've maybe submitted 15 of these. They say right on the form that they won't review individual reports, so it obviously goes into a black hole. I've tried creating support tickets with no luck. This is a big problem with centralized technology platforms, I can't fix a problem and it affects 3 prominent social media platforms...

... but suggest the social media companies sell user data and suddenly I became very popular.

All 5 employees were very defensive that no social media companies are selling user data.
They explained why they are so defensive...

Social media companies are the only ones who aren't selling user data, and they cop all the blame but it's actually all the other companies that are selling data.

I totally understand that, it must be frustrating when you feel like you're consistently being blamed for something and you're on the good guys.... but, ah, I'm just not sure massive technology companies Meta, Google, Amazon, X-Twitter, Snapchat deserve all our sympathy just yet.

So, what about the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal?

Facebook paid a $5 Billion fine to the US Federal Trade Commission and a £500,000 fine to the UK Information Commissioner's office in 2019 after Cambridge Analytica was accused of assisting the Donald Trump and Ted Cruz 2016 campaigns and the Brexit referendum with the help of up to 87 million Facebook profiles.

However... there was no proof that Facebook sold that user data to Cambridge Analytica, instead, it was harvested via an app called This is Your Digital Life where people filled out questionnaires but then the app would collect data on their user's Facebook friends as well.

Data was collected on at least 30 million users while only 270,000 people downloaded the app.

[Source]

Okay, so Facebook didn't sell any user data... but social media user data was used and likely sold and purchased - just not by a social media company.

What about those ads I see on Instagram after I Google something?

This literally happened to me today. I looked at this article about invasive apps on my computer, and then Instagram showed me an ad for pCloud on my phone a couple of hours later.

Okay, so Meta says outright that it doesn't sell any user data, but then how does Instagram seem to know what ads to show you?

Meta says that it doesn't sell any user data? But does it buy user data from other platforms? Does it share user data with advertisers, developers or platforms?

As Meta is developing it's own generative AI, it has allowed users to opt out of having their user data part of the training models (LLMs) by filling out this form. The thing is though, you can't opt out of Meta using the data it already has on you, you can only 'request' to opt out of the third party data...

Information from third parties includes what is publicly available on the internet and licensed information that someone else owns and gives Meta permission to use.

... a company could give Meta their data out of the kindness of their capitialistic hearts - but I think it's likely that Meta would purchase that data, or make some sort of trade.

So, Meta may or may not purchase user data, we can't be sure.

In terms of Instagram showing you ads for something you Googled... that's actually not Meta purchasing that data. The website you visit asked you to accept cookies, which keeps information on your IP address or device or whatever... and that website owner can pay Meta to show ads to anyone who recently visited their site.
This comes to the crux of what the 5 Meta employees individually told me why I was wrong:

It's way more profitable for social media companies to keep all their user data to themselves and charge advertisers to use that juicy, juicy user data. Data is power and power is money and so it would be crazy for them to sell that data.

Advertising is very expensive, so it's way more cost-effective to target users very specifically using their social media data. The advertisers don't see your social media user data, they just pay to target very specific demographics that you may belong to.

So, that makes sense to me. It's not because social media companies are desperate to earn the trust of their user base or to protect them or anything, it's just that it's more profitable to not.

That said, in all my discussions with these folk, I did find this:

Ten of YouTube’s trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity.

For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn’t opt into allowing tracking in each app’s settings, according to the study.

[Source]

YouTube and TikTok are apparently allowing third parties to track user data from their apps. The Meta employees might be correct, social media companies probably aren't selling user data, but are YouTube and TikTok selling access to user data? Or trading it, or giving it away for free?
When I brought this up it was suggested that it was a convoluted conspiracy theory...

... which maybe it is? I don't know, I'm not an expert in this area. The lack of transparency really makes it hard for me to believe that I'm being completely unreasonable or ridiculous. Maybe social media companies are being unfairly tarnished, but they collect just so much data on the hours and hours people spend on their sites that I'm just not willing to let them completely off the hook.

We know that mobile apps sell all sorts of data to data brokerage firms, we know data brokerage firms secure data from lots of different places to try and create profiles on us (see, John Oliver), we know that advertisers have fled X-Twitter and it now its own users are warning each other about the ads shown. Can anyone say for absolute certain that Elon has never and will never sell any user data?

Public companies have to disclose earnings, but I honestly don't know if sales of user data would have to be disclosed, or if it would be included under other types of revenue. If not, we might never know if social media companies sold any user data or not.

I personally don't think it's wild to think that its likely that at some point (past or future) a social media company could sell user data. Maybe not if there were regulations, but if the only reason is that its more profitable not to, that does feel like a situation that could eventually change.

I know most people don't really care... as long as they can access the things they want to access, they don't care how their data is used... but personally I think that if my data is being sold then I should see some of that profit, after all, the data is about me.

So what's the answer to the question, do social media companies sell user data?

I'd say no.

The Meta employees absolutely convinced me that it's just not profitable, at least for the really big tech companies.

That's not to say smaller apps and websites aren't selling data to data brokerage firms, or that the big tech companies wouldn't consider it if someone threw enough money at them. I don't think we can assume any of these companies put user privacy at the forefront, as we saw Meta provide police with unencrypted messages between a mother and daughter about abortion pills.

I do think there is some danger in both what data brokerage firms collect about us, and what social media companies infer about us. They both might infer our health, our sexuality, our political leanings, our struggles based on our online activity, and maybe that'll always just be for targeted ads or maybe it has unknown impacts on our lives, particularly if you have an important job (Nov 2023 report)- it's really hard to say. I don't personally think government agencies are overreacting to ban Tik Tok on government devices.

What can we do about it?

VPNs definitely help. The free Brave Browser has both an inbuilt ad-blocker and available VPN (the VPN is current $10 a month). VPNs give you a random IP address each session making it harder for you to be tracked. The inbuilt ad-blocker is incredible. Your browsing is so much faster because ads are usually the first thing loaded and I personally I find all the ads on videos on YouTube so infuriating so it saves me a bunch of time.

I would also delete the accounts of social media platforms you're not using, check which apps have access to your location on your phone (and deny access to the ones that don't make sense) and just generally be aware of what you do online. Remember, your social media DMs aren't called PMs (Private Messages) anymore.

So what do you think? Conspiracy theory or possible?

Thanks so much for reading!

First published on the gFam blog : https://gfam.live/blog/do-social-media-companies-sell-your-data

Cover Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash